We need to talk about Kevin, a film directed by Lynne Ramsay and released in 2010 in a British-American co-production, starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Riley and Ezra Miller. Sound design was conceived by John Davies, who had already collaborated with Ramsay on We were never really here. The film talks about Eva Khactchadourian’s awful experience raising a child, which undertook to the toxic relationship between both and consequently ended up in a tragic and horrific scenario.
The film could be separated into three parts:
1st – in the first minutes of the film, we get to know Eva Khactchadourian’s current state: she’s emotionally affected by one happening in her life; she is living by herself and just moved into a new neighbourhood; Eva doesn’t have a good relationship with her neighbours; she’s looking for a job.
2nd – raising Kevin, from the fecundation to adolescence. It explores Eva’s emotional relationship with her son, with her past, present and future. We get to know how badly she thinks her life is over after the birth of her first child. It is more abstract and surreal. The spectator understands Eva’s perspective on how fleeting was her life when she was happy and how ambiguous it became after Kevin’s appearance. This part builds up to the bigger reveal: the massacre.
3rd – rationalisation of Kevin’s crime; the conscious perspective of reality and present; The film no longer goes under a post-modern veil. Actions develop more avidly and consciously. Both Eva and the spectator know what is about to come.
4th – the massacre; ending. The film goes back to step 1, and the spectator goes again through Eva’s lucid realisations of her past and present self. It has all the information needed to understand Eva’s struggle. The last scene could be considered the dismantling of all this anxious belief that she held till that final moment.
As Brett Ashleigh states in her article A Feminist Approach to sound in ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’, the film is a multidisciplinary audiovisual piece. It tells the main character’s story through all the different stems. In the first 30 minutes, the film goes through Eva’s flashbacks, which mix both emotional, sensory, and psychological. It was a pure audiovisual piece where sound and image communicated perfectly, giving the storyline a lot more intensity. The sound design exists almost separately from the visual narrative, as though the same story were told from divorced perspectives. Ashleigh also separates the different speeches present in the film: the female narrative and the patriarchal linearity. This idea is reinforced by the book The Laugh of the Medusa, written by Helen Cixous, which explains that l’ecriture féminine “is the practice of writing in spiralling compositions to move the writing outside the sphere of patriarchal linearity to alter the narrative structure. The use of non-vocal or non-linguistic sound elements representing feminine cinematic art is predominant throughout the film.
Nevertheless, this type of language could be resumed as the point of view, which assumes in We Need to Talk About Kevin an essential role to demystify the world from Eva’s perspective. In this case, it could be the point of audition: “In films and television, a diegetic sound that is perceived by a particular character. The aural equivalent of a point-of-view shot: e.g. if a person is hiding under blankets, the sounds heard by them, and the audience is muffled. (Oxford, 2021).
point-of-audition sound. Oxford Reference. Retrieved 23 Oct. 2021, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100333623.